I Am an Atheist, but I Go to Church Everyday

If someone asked me whether I thought God was real in a debate, I’d say no. I experience a cognitive dissonance in which I find praying emotionally and spiritually fulfilling. Yet, I can’t intellectually justify the existence of a higher-order being through logic and reason.

All the dogmatic details in many religions that discriminate against many marginalised people turn me off. As such, the version of religion that I find spiritually meaningful is stripped bare of all those details and focuses only on my relationship with spirituality and how it can improve my life.

If you ask whether I believe in God, I will say no. But I still go to church and pray every day.

What drew me to religion again after many years was when I developed a unique relationship with my sewing needles. Some needles feel better than others.

I had experienced a severe depressive episode that left my deck of available action cards only to contain scratching myself with needles while listening to Bach, sitting catatonic in an upward fetal position, or spontaneously erupting in a waterworks show whenever you think of the things you don’t want to think about but feel like you should because you must find a way to amend for them.

I know what I should do in my head. Get up, do the right things, stop feeling like shit. Yet, I felt guilt and shame over everything I did in such moments. It was a freeze response that overextended its stay, and I did not know how to kick it out of my mind.

So, I asked my partner, “Can you tell me what to do?”

“I can’t tell you what to do. You need to decide for yourself,” my partner replied.

“Alright. Then, repeat after me verbatim: ‘I instruct you to work out every day, and today you have to shower, get dressed, and leave the house to study,’” I said.

“Okay…” he hesitated, confused. “I instruct you to work out every day, and today you have to shower, get dressed, and leave the house to study. I will add one more thing. You have to eat two and a half full meals at least, no less, every day.”

Weirdly, after he told me to, I was very motivated to work out, go out, and eat healthy. I thought Secretary (2002) was ridiculous when the female protagonist’s lover could seemingly quickly stop her self-harm and other daily habits just by instructing her once.

But I get it now. When you don’t trust yourself and have been routinely denied agency by other people growing up and made to doubt yourself, having someone else give instructions for you can feel very liberating.

I realised then that I was getting to be, or perhaps, more likely, already dependent on my partner. Whenever he leaves for a time, it feels like rubbing salt on the nerves of my heart. The pain feels so severe that I can physically feel my heart constrict.

Why am I so dependent on him? I asked myself. Analysing my feelings, I realised that I saw him as more than a reliable person but had emotionally elevated him to a state that put him above others. By putting him on a pedestal, I unintentionally dehumanised him. He was now my projection of what I wanted him to be instead of who he was.

As I realised this, I was suddenly struck with a strange and visceral compulsion to attend church. I hadn’t stepped foot in a place of worship or prayed in years; I grew up with an antagonistic relationship with religion.

In my preteen years, I would read the Bible with the sole intention of scribbling refutations of any misogynistic or anti-scientific claims I found in the margins. My mother would always buy me new Bibles with lovely pink covers for preteen girls with the hope that I would stop damaging them if they were pretty, but their contents offended me too much to be successfully bribed with pink and glitter.

Growing up, I had an unusual relationship with religion: I was initially a Theravada Buddhist, then got converted to Catholicism, but primarily went to a Protestant church every Sunday, and only went to Catholic churches very recently.

I was initially Buddhist because my paternal grandfather was a Theravada Buddhist. In traditional Chinese families, he would be the more influential member of the extended family because he was a grandfather from the paternal side, so I grew up with his religion.

But, after he passed away, my father (whose mother was Protestant) wanted me to convert to Protestantism. Still, my Catholic mother protested (no pun intended) and asked me to choose my religion. I was around ten at this time and didn’t understand religion, but I liked my mom much more than my dad, so I converted to Catholicism.

However, we always went to Protestant churches to accompany my dad and paternal grandma. Only after my parents got divorced did I go to a Catholic church.

The more I learned about Christianity, the more I grew antagonistic to it. I couldn’t tolerate the misogyny, and whenever I heard the Priest say something hateful towards queer or marginalised people, I had to leave the mass to avoid physically getting emotional in front of my family.

Now that I am relatively independent, I don’t bother pretending that I am religious unless I have to, like when I’m around people who want to put atheists on a stake. I’ll say I’m spiritual, not to offend anyone.

Today, I am not as staunch of an atheist because I concede that science doesn’t answer all the questions. It doesn’t answer how you should live your life and what is the right thing to do, and it doesn’t help to cope with life’s difficulties, such as grief, anger, and death anxiety.

At times, I desperately needed someone to tell me what to do. Because I didn’t believe in God, I unconsciously put that burden on my partner; I wanted him to tell me what to do with the authority of a higher being, which made me realise that I do, as much as I resist the thought, need the idea of a God.

My assumption was proven true when my partner wasn’t around when I stopped feeling anxious after I started praying at church daily.

My prayer is not addressed to a specific godlike figure like Jesus or Buddha. I didn’t even mention the Lord or God at all. My prayer is the same every day, and it helps me manage feelings of sadness and anger:

“I wish love, health, and happiness for [my closest family members and friends]. I wish love, health, and happiness for [my acquaintances]. I wish love, health, and happiness for [the people who have hurt me in the past].”

I would visualise each person and repeat the sentence for each individual. After every prayer, it feels like a burden has been lifted from my chest, and every day, it feels slightly lighter.

Previously, I dismissed anyone who invalidated my need for therapy and medication with, “Just go to church if you are depressed!”

While I don’t think spirituality can entirely replace therapy and medication, I have now found the benefit of religion, too.

Perhaps it is not the concept of a higher being itself that is meaningful to me about religion, but that religious practices involving rituals, community, art, music, and the like are morally praised forms of what Byung-Chul Han would call “beautiful gestures that serve no purpose.”

Religious practices are a form of escape from the neurotic productivity within the capitalist system’s producer-consumer dynamic. Most forms of rest, such as spas, excellent restaurants, movies, and trips to beautiful places, involve being a consumer.

Under the capitalist system, these forms of inactivity are also morally criticised as being lazy instead of doing something ‘productive’. Even making friends is now called networking, which imposes a metric onto befriending someone, taking the pleasure away from getting to know them for the sake of friendship.

It could be argued that God is the purpose of religion. For a committed religious person, everything they do must be for God.

Perhaps not considering God as real helps me find religion therapeutic. Because then, my prayers serve no purpose — which in the end helps me to help myself beautifully.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

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